According to the Church's system you emailed at 3:25 p.m. today... (6/16/08)

Where'd you get the time machine?1

This week I have had several weird dreams. Four nights in a row I've had dreams about disobedience. One night I was watching Green Acres2 (the Church's system does not allow for manual, keyboard, or HTML formatting for italics, and quotation marks are also technically grammatically incorrect, so I am not formatting the titles--I recognize this and waive myself of responsibility for violating standard English practices), and trying to justify it; another night the white handbook said not to sing simple common songs like "Jingle Bells" but instead to sing songs like "I Am the Walrus" around our companions, although we still were not permitted to listen to those songs (I think that detail comes from the fact that the Ensign this month mentioned the Beatles in the Random Sampler section, which I thought was kind of worldly3); another night I tried to buy pet fish; and last night I was listening to Coldplay and trying to justify it. In addition to disobeying rules, I have seen people hanging off of airplanes hovering over cherry orchards (cherry orchards are very prevalent here), I have slept on a pile of corpses (I wasn't sure they were under the blankets at first), and I have tried to come up with whatever clothing I could when I had to walk home in my garments.

And I think I forgot a shirt in my list to you, the orange one that says, "You drive me batty." Odd, since that's my favorite one.4

I am excited for a week when we baptize Jess K. His grandma is his only close active relative, although he wants his RM cousin to baptize him, but we're not sure if he's active because he's not in our ward. In addition to his date and Nan's birthday, it is also Elder H.'s birthday, a missionary who was in the MTC with me and with whom we share the car, so we see him on a daily basis.

My bike has been somewhat problematic. During the transfer the back brake became disconnected but that was an easy fix; last week the handlebars decided to loose themselves and continually had to be tightened; and on Friday the tire went flat.5 We thought we had repaired it with slime and patches, but indeed it was flat again yesterday. I may have to get a new tire or something.

For some reason I can't think of what more to write this week. I thought of Allie yesterday, thinking of last Father's Day when she went up and sang, and gave me a Father's Day card.6 That was before I started work, and was a wonderful time.

Love,

Elder Melville

1I sent my email in the morning, but my missionary email account said my mom had sent a letter in the afternoon.

2According to Chicago Manual of Style and others, names of long works, including TV shows, should be italicized. But my anguish over this issue might have been alleviated if I had known that AP style uses quotation marks. Or I could just not have worried about it.

3See this.

4My family had told me they had gone through my clothes and found I had 26 or 27 Snoopy shirts. Very awkwardly, I sent home a handwritten letter documenting all the Snoopy shirts I owned, which was more than they told me. Most of them were holiday shirts. I have since gotten rid of most of them, because they quit fitting me, and I’m less comfortable wearing cartoon characters, and most of them were just stock pictures with some kind of decoration outside the official Peanuts canon.

5East Wenatchee was where I was first introduced to goatheads, a plant that has plagued me ever since.

6On Father’s Day in 2007, my niece was not quite four years old. She sang Father’s Day songs with the primary. Her class made Father’s Day cards. She didn’t have a father, so she made cards for me and my dad. The one for me said “I like to play Mario with my Uncle Mark.” The one for my dad said “I like to watch Monster House with my Pops.” That night we went to my grandparents’ house, and she sang a line from one of the songs she had learned: “Back to our home above.” Then she said she had sung “the tale of it.” See this post.